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Random thoughts with sporadically profound meaning

Monthly Archives: February 2018

Do you remember when you were fresh out of college or university and wanting to find that perfect job in the field you just spent four years studying? You got money from your parents to buy the perfect “power outfit”, perhaps an attaché case to look more professional, and then you set off in search of gainful employment. You arrived on time for each interview and got told the same thing from each prospective employer – come back when you’ve got some experience. As you left the interviews, the thought in the back of your mind got stuck on a crazy loop in your head and played incessantly – if nobody will give me a job, how can I gain the experience I need?

Looking for a literary agent is much the same for a debut author. It took more than four years, from conception to finished product, for me to write my first novel. I put more focus and emotion into creating the story than I ever expended in college and I am truly proud of the finished product. The people who have taken the time to read it have loved it.

But convincing an agent to give the whole story a chance is like applying for a job with no real world experience. Those first five or ten pages you submit are like your first two minutes in a job interview, they are introductory and don’t really give the person reading you enough time to see what you are really about. They can only judge you based on a succinct appraisal that doesn’t give your story time to prove itself and, in the end, they prefer an author who has been previously published. In other words, they don’t want to give the job to people who don’t have experience.

This post is not an attack on literary agents, by any means. I get it. They receive a plethora of emails from thousands of people who think they could be the next Dean Koontz, Nicholas Sparks or J.K. Rowling. Their email inboxes must feel like a revolving door, having multiple queries thrown at them every time the door makes a new revolution.

My intent with this post is not to blame literary agents for being so busy. My intent with this post is to merely put a wish into the universe that, one day, that revolving door will find a giant foot wedged into it allowing my query to fall into the right inbox at the right time. Just maybe, I can impress someone enough to have them read the whole manuscript and to get the job without having previous experience.

When it comes to making decisions, I like to take my time to weigh all my options. I am not a “fly by the seat of my pants” kind of person so I choose to give a great deal of thought to the choices I make. Last year, choosing to suspend my satellite subscription was the best choice I have made in a long time because it resulted in me being able to focus on my writing and finish my first novel.

This year, I wanted that ‘lightning in a bottle’ experience again so I contacted my satellite provider and arranged to have my service disrupted on the 9th of February. I counted on that move to encourage my creativity and focus my attention on my new book. I hadn’t counted on the Olympics beginning just as my TV programming was ending.

There are a handful of free channels still available on my Bell network and one of those channels is covering the Olympics. Sadly that channel is a French station and, although I excelled in my Grade 10 French class, there is no mention of the little dog Pitou or finding a sweater because it is cold. If, at some point, either of the phrases, “Il fait froid aujourd’hui, ou est mon chandail” or “Ou est Pitou?” should ever be uttered, those words will be some of the very few I shall have understood during the entire 2018 Winter Olympics.

Thankfully, emotion is a universal language. While I cannot understand most of what the commentators are saying during the games, I can comprehend what the athletes are feeling after they have crossed their finish lines or completed their programs. Exhilaration and anguish do not need words to be conveyed. On Monday night, I watched Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir perform their Free Skate in the Ice Dance Competition. Once their program was completed, I muted my TV and simply watched their body language and their smiles. I didn’t need anyone telling me how they felt because I could feel it just watching them.

Sometimes taking the rhetoric out of a situation allows us to truly perceive the emotion as it is meant to be conveyed – naturally, organically and wordlessly. Je pense, ne pas etre capable d’entendre les mots m’a fait comprende encore plus.

I have learned a great deal about the writing world as I have begun to emerge myself in my quest to find a literary agent. Each agent has unique specifications for sending a query and a fledgling author is bound to follow those guidelines or run the risk of having their submission thrown into the slush pile.

Many agents follow a similar model for submissions so it becomes a less daunting task as time goes on, but then you get the agent who asks you to sum up your manuscript in one sentence. For me, that is a very arduous task. There are so many twists and turns to my story that it is extremely difficult to craft one sentence that can convey every nuance of the story.

Imagine that you are in a job interview and you are asked to describe yourself in one sentence. Can you do it? Or are there so many different facets to you that coming up with one line to describe all of those things is impossible?

While I gave my all to put together a sentence that did its best to describe my novel, I know I did not do my story justice. My book requires much more than just one sentence to fully illustrate its depth. After I wrote that sentence, I felt like a test car that had crashed into the wall before reaching its maximum speed.

I have been more careful in selecting agents who are willing to allow me to give much more insight into my novel than just one sentence. Even sending the first three chapters does not truly allow the people who hold my future in their hands enough material to see what the story truly has in store for them. I can only hope that they see enough bait to make them swim closer to the hook and take a full bite. I can promise, they will be reeled in if they take the chance!

Writing is a portal into the deepest reaches of our imagination. There are no rules, apart from grammar and sentence structure, so a writer is free to craft a story about anything that tickles our fancy.

I really began my writing journey when I was eleven years old. I loved the fact that words could take me to far away places, places that I had created, and that I could get lost in those words for hours. It didn’t matter, back then, if the story was silly. All that mattered is that I was transported into another world by words, captivated by ideas and compelled to chase the feeling of elation I got by writing a story or a poem.

I still get that same feeling of euphoria when I write. Some days the words don’t flow as easily, but on the days that they do my fingers can’t type the words fast enough. I love to look back at the beginning of this blog to see just how much the voice of my writing has changed. I didn’t know that the stages of writing included puberty but I certainly found that stage and my writing voice changed to become the one I have now, the voice that wrote my book.

I am hopeful that becoming a published author is something that is written in the stars, for me, and not written in the sand. But if the writing Gods have scribbled my name on the beach, only to see it washed away by the tide, I will always have my words.

In the crusade to get my blood pressure back to a normal number, I have been having regular visits with my doctor. During one of our discussions about why my numbers might be up, I disclosed a few things that have been making me feel anxious, things that never were even a blip on my radar a few years ago but now sound alarms like I am at Defcon 2. I am nervous about driving at night. I now take my dog to work as often as I can in the winter because I am paranoid about the heater in my basement catching fire and Callaway being trapped inside the house. You get the idea. My doctor merely smiled and nodded, leaned back, laced her fingers together and told me I was experiencing “The Grandmother Effect”.

Never having had children of my own, I was mildly perplexed as to why I would be showing symptoms of a phenomenon that I should not be experiencing. She went on to tell me that “women of a certain age” begin to worry more about the things that had never bothered them before. It comes part and parcel with the beginning stages of the dreaded menopause, or as a dear man in my life used to say, “the meno”.

Women’s bodies are finely tuned to develop certain idiosyncrasies as they reach certain ages and their minds are hard-wired to react to those stimuli. I am certainly at an age where I could be a grandmother and, with an imagination like mine, I could begin to conjure up all kinds of horrific scenarios that may happen to the next generation of my family, had I had children. Or perhaps I am projecting those fears in regards to my nephews and worrying about them as they navigate their way through this life. As my doctor explained it further, I could truly comprehend why I was having these irrational feelings and worrying about things that had never bothered me in the past.

The “meno” is coming. It is inevitable and a necessary step to get to the next plateau of my life. I have experienced my first full-on hot flash in the middle of the night. I can only say it was like being on fire but being soaking wet at the same time. Sadly, the water didn’t extinguish the flames. I have decided that, from now on, I will refer to any future hot flashes as ‘my personal summer’.

Knowing that my worries are explainable has helped to slightly ease the stress. Now I can only peer into the opening of the “meno” tunnel and hope it is a quick trip to the other side.